“I think there’s absolutely not one second of hesitancy,” Krzyzewski said on The John Feinstein Show. “I’d trade for Kevin Love. That’s not saying anything about any of the other (players involved in the deal). Love’s an All-Star.”

“He’s a double-double guy, but he’s a double-double guy that can spread the court,” Krzyzewski said. “There aren’t many double-double guys, if any, who spread the court. He can go inside and outside. There may be a low-post player that gets you a double-double, but Love does it and you can do a lot of different things with him.”

“I mean, I’ve coached him on two teams,” he said. “No pun intended, but I love Kevin Love. He’s young, too. He’s 25. He was 21 (when I coached him). We had six 21-year-olds on our 2010 Istanbul team, and Kevin was one of them. He’s grown. He’s terrific. I would make that trade right away.”

Kevin Durant highlights the star-studded 19-man roster of hopefuls for the USA Basketball training camp in Las Vegas this summer, from which the 2014 USA World Cup Team will be selected. From the press release:

Added to the 2014-16 USA National Team roster and participating in the July-28-Aug. 1 USA National Team training camp in Las Vegas, Nevada, are NBA standouts DeMar DeRozan (Toronto Raptors) and Chandler Parsons (Dallas Mavericks).

“If I were involved with the NBA I wouldn’t want a 19-year-old or a 20-year-old kid, to bring into all the travel and all the problems that exist in the NBA. I would want a much more mature kid. I would want a kid that maybe I’ve been watching on another team and now he’s 21, 22 years old instead of 18 or 19, and I might trade for that kid. On top of it all, the NBA does a tremendous, gigantic disservice to college basketball. It’s as though they’ve raped college basketball in my opinion.

“Major League Baseball has the best idea of all. Three years before they’ll take a kid out of college, then they have a minor league system that they put the kids in. I’m sure that if the NBA followed the same thing, there would be a lot of kids in a minor league system that still were not good enough to play in the major NBA.”

No follow-up question was asked regarding Knight’s comment.

This isn’t Knight’s first run-in with casually using the word rape. In a 1988 interview, Knight, when asked how to handle stress, told Connie Chung, “I think that if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.”

According to the AP, Mike Krzyzewski has recruited Tom Thibdeau and Monty Williams to his coaching staff for the USA Basketball program: “USA bringing the defense to the next Olympics: Thibodeau, Monty Williams joining Boeheim on Coach K’s staff, per source.”

Just when Mike Krzyzewski thought he was out, USA Basketball appears to have managed to pull him back in. According to SI, Coach K will rejoin the program as they go for Gold at the 2016 Olympic Games: “Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski will be returning as the head coach of USA Basketball for the 2016 Olympics, according to a source with direct knowledge of the situation. A formal announcement is expected in the next 48 hours. Krzyzewski led Team USA to gold medals in both the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2012 London Olympics. He had maintained for months that he would not return before reversing course in an interview with SI.com on Saturday. Krzyzewski, 66, has a 62-1 record with USA Basketball, and his tenure will now be extended to coach in the 2014 FIBA World Championship in Madrid and the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. USA Basketball chairman Jerry Colangelo has stayed confident since the end of the 2012 Olympics that he could persuade Krzyzewski to return. He waited until the end of Duke’s season in March to court Krzyzewski. In an interview on Saturday, Colangelo said he would not begin contacting other candidates until Krzyzewski said no.”